Louisville must vacate 2013 NCAA basketball title

I don't like either, but is Pitino lesser than Calipari?

 

Let's be perfectly honest here. The University of Louisville sold its soul the day Tom Jurich walked through the door. Shit always flows downhill.

 

Depends how you view it all. For me, Cal is still coaching at Kentucky and Patino was forced out in disgrace and will never coach again. They may both be cheaters, but I'd say Cal's legacy is more intact for that reason alone.

 

Maybe they are equals when actually coaching basketball. Maybe Pitino is actually better as a coach.
But as Div1 head coaches of elites programs, Pitino is an egregious sleaze monster. Calipari is just a bigger prick than most

 

I'm just struck by how sloppy Pitino got with his cheating. If we are working on the assumption that most programs are dirty to some degree, I'd guess at least 95 percent must be smarter about it than Louisville.

It also doesn't day a whole lot for UL that the staff felt like hiring some skeezy hookers was a better inducement than simply taking them to a party with co-eds.

 

Or maybe the skeevy hookers WERE co-eds. With Louisville, it's hard to tell.

 

I don't know much about the student population at Louisville, but I know when I attended a big basketball school the recruits in town usually had sorority girls all over them. Seems like that would be a better selling point.

 

I guess I work under the assumption that Calipari remains largely unexposed for the time being.
As Pitino was not that long ago.

 

Who's had more NCAA tournament appearances vacated?

 

At least for now.

 

I feel icky even defending Cal a little, because who knows how much other stuff there is, but the stuff that got the Memphis Final Four vacated seems downright quaint compared to multiple scandals that have happened since, including Louisville.

That said, probably the biggest difference between Cal and Pitino is being smarter about plausible deniability.

 

Before Kentucky? No. Now that he's there and he had all of Nike's power behind him? Yeah, but you'll notice that, once Coach K wanted all the top guys, he got more than his share, and Cal's program is just a notch off what it was when he got there. Still great. Not quite what it was.